Olympia and Olympia's Reply

Olympia

His ‘yellow bellied odalisque', half painted
half sketched, outraged the Salon's bourgeois passion.
They strung her up well out of reach. Acquainted
with Ingres’ languid goddesses, high fashion
extolled coy Venuses with moist eyes rolling
in servile ecstasy. Olympia’s gaze
confounds voyeurs by craftily controlling
ardent males; drawn by her power to amaze,
they sense too late Manet, not God, created
woman. Anonymous bouquets from doting
suitors, haughtily she ignores. Defeated,
admirers pay out handsomely for nothing:
no painted lady proffers carnal pleasure,
that sloe-black stare remains her only treasure.

Olympia's Reply

All day I watch my onlookers pass by;
I know each one: the quiet connoisseur,
the withering critic and the shy voyeur.
They choose to see behind my hawkish eye
the artist's role, the calculated stare
that seeks delight in mawkish male discomfort.
They cannot own me, though I may be bought,
it's their desire, not mine, that I lay bare.

Admirers, I dismiss with cool disdain.
Instead, all through the empty evening hours,
I contemplate the Monet opposite;
disregarded, I delight in the mundane -
the breezy sky, a garden full of flowers,
and Summer days, eternally sunlit.

I think I first came across an illustration of Manet's Olympia in Michael Levey's 'Concise History of Painting, From Giotto to Cezanne', which I used at school as my main source book when studying the History of Art for A Level. No doubt the scandal which surrounded the first exhibition of the work in 1865 and its intriguing relationship with previous reclining Venuses by Goya and Titian, amongst others, would have been something which I learnt more about  as part of my degree course at Manchester University. So, by the time I first saw the painting 'in the flesh', when Gill and I first visited Paris in 1979, I had a good grounding in its history and significance. However, the effect of the painting's physical presence was quite different to looking at it in a book. Firstly it was bigger than I imagined; secondly, the 'sketchy' quality of parts of the painting - for example the cartoon-like cat, was  more marked; finally, Olympia's 'hard look' was much more discomforting to the spectator when experienced for real. The genius of the painting is to place the onlooker, particularly a male onlooker, in the position of Olympia's next customer. No coy, veiled eroticism here, it's all full-on and unambiguous. No wonder it provoked a furore.

I always wanted to write something about it but never quite knew where to start. In the Summer of 2003 someone posted a challenge on Sonnet Central to produce a sonnet with the same feminine rhymes as Shakespeare's famous XXth for inclusion in a forthcoming anthology. The opportunity to purloin the rhymes from this homoerotic 'tour de force' and apply them to the ambiguities surrounding voyeurism, sexual identity and gender roles implicit in Manet's painting was just too tempting. I struggled though, I had never tried to use a received rhyme scheme before and the whole thing took longer than expected Though I missed  the competition deadline, I did end up with an interesting and thought provoking sonnet taking a male perspective in contrast to  more feminist analyses of the work typified by  Margaret Atwood's poem, which admittedly I had not come across at the time.

From whatever stance you take, it is undeniable that Manet's painting is a revolutionary depiction of the female nude which takes a more modern, analytical view of this particular genre and the iconography associated with it. The fate of the model, Victorine Meurent, becomes even more ironic given the iconic status that Olympia was to achieve. Manet used Victorine as a model extensively in during the 1860's.



Victorine Meurent

A petite redhead, so small that she earned the nickname 'the shrimp', Victorine worked as a semi-professional musician around the cafes' of Paris as well as modelling and developing her own skill as a painter. During the 1870's her more academic style found some favour with the art establishment and her work was accepted by the Salon at the time. She contunued to work as a model up until the 1880's for painters such as Toulouse Lautrec, but not for Manet, perhaps because of stylistic disagreements. Later she faded into obscurity and died in poverty in 1927 in Colombes, a working class suburb of Paris where she had lived, unkown and ignored, with a female companion during her later years. However she did not entirely turn her back on her previous bohemian existence. In a census from the 1920's she described her occupation as 'artist'. Only one painting survives that can be attributed to Victorine Meurent with any certainty, a sweet, rather sentimental semi-religious work called 'Palm Sunday'.

Le jour de rameaux, Victorine Meurent.

It is hardly avante garde, but well executed, showing considerable facility and a beautiful sense of tone, texture and light. If my two sonnets ever get back into print I think I shall dedicate them to the memory of Victorine. It is true, when 'disregarded' she did 'delight in the mundane'. I sense that happiness lies in small pleasures not great ideas, and if these two sonnets have any overiding message at all, maybe the journey from complex analysis to simple reflection found from the first poem to the next celebrates that sentiment. 

Having written the sonnets I had a strong desire to see the original again. Some months later I managed to visit the Musee d'Orsay.



Quiet connoisseur or shy voyeur?



Once I had engaged with Olympia through the first sonnet, Olympia's Reply' was quite easy to write, I simply inhabited her 'sloe-black stare' and wrote about what I saw, first of all describing the people who crowd to look at me, then after the gallery closes, musing on the painting opposite. Everyone who has commented on the two poems seems to prefer the second sonnet, I suppose because it is a simple idea quite well executed. The first sonnet is more analytical and more complicated, probably because of this I struggled a bit, and it shows.

I am a bit muddled about 'the painting opposite'. All the sources I have looked at state that Olympia was in the Louvre before it was moved to the Musee d'Orsay when the gallery opened in 1986. However, I recall from my visit to Paris in 1979  that I saw Olympia in the Jau de Paume. I have no specific memory of the painting which may have hung opposite it, I just speculated that it might have been an impressionist landscape with a garden full of flowers. It just seems too co-incidental that when I saw the work for the second time, this was indeed the case, a fragment of Monet's early, monumental work, 'The Picnic'.

Sometimes, as a poet, you need luck as well as inspiration; maybe a capacity to make inspired guesses is more fundamental to the art of poetry than we like to acknowledge.